[The welcome news for me is that the complete French translation of Shaking the Pumpkin is now on the verge of publication – scheduled for sometime in November by Presses Universitaires de Rouen et du Havre. As such it forms a companion volume to Techniciens du Sacré (Jose Corti, 2008) and makes available in French the two opening works in my long-term ethnopoetics project. In its present form Secouer la Citrouille is part of the Collection "To" directed with great care by poet and editor Christophe Lamiot and features a marvelous translation into French by Anne Talvaz. Scheduled for next year in Lamiot’s series is a new book of mine, A Field on Mars (Un Champ sur Mars) : Poèmes 2000-20015, which will appear in simultaneous English and French editions. The works taken together answer my call and need for a new/old poetry that crosses all borders and times, toward a genuine if problematic omnipoetics. The following selections in English and French give a sense of the book’s possibilities and limitations. (J.R.)]

CE QUE LA REPONDANTE A DIT A FRANZ BOAS EN 1920Keresan

il y a longtemps sa mère

dut chanter cette chanson et ainsi

elle devait moudre à ce rythme

le peuple du maïs aussi a un chant

il est très bon

je ne le dirai pas

WHAT THE INFORMANT SAID TO FRANZ BOAS IN 1920Keresan

long ago her mother

had to sing this song and so

she had to grind along with it

the corn people have a song too

it is very good

I refuse to tell it

English version by Armand Schwerner

Pre-Face 2015 (English)

In the aftermath of Technicians of the Sacred (1968) the next step I took toward the construction of an experimental ethnopoetics was an assemblage of traditional works and commentaries focused entirely on one of the world’s still surviving and incredibly diverse “deep cultures.” The resultant work, Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas, was published by Doubleday Anchor in 1972 and in revised versions by Alfred van der Marck Editions (1986) and the University of New Mexico Press (1991). As with Technicians I drew from a wide range of previously published materials, supplemented in this instance by direct translations of my own and by those of later and very significant translators such as Dennis Tedlock and Howard Norman. I also continued to be freed by the opening of poetry among us to expand the range of what we saw as poetry elsewhere including sound works, visual works, and event and performance pieces on the model of contemporary happenings and performance art. My own translations – “total” and otherwise – from Seneca (with songmaker and ritual performer Richard Johnny John) and from Navajo (through the good offices of ethnomusicologist David McAllester) were also first presented here, and the commentaries, much like those in Technicians, provided analogues to other primal cultures and to the work of contemporary avantgardists. In the process I made no pretense about my own connection to the Indian nations in question, though for a period of a decade and more it was far from trivial, and my next ethnopoetic assemblage, A Big Jewish Book (later republished as Exiled in the Word) was in fact an exploration of ancestral sources of my own “in a world of Jewish mystics, thieves, and madmen.”

After three decades in print the life of Shaking the Pumpkin came to a natural closure several years ago, though a new edition has remained a tempting possibility since then. The work, as I look at it now, is still only partial and must always be so, yet it gives some sense in its present translated form of the range of structures and themes in this and other of our ethnopoetic gatherings – part of a process of composition that I’ve spoken of elsewhere as “othering” and that the great Brazilian avantgardist Haroldo de Campos has aptly termed “transcreation.” Such approaches, as we view them, have appeared to many of us not as a distortion or falsification of the original works but as the most poetic and therefore the most honest way to bring them forward. As we advance into a new century and millennium the works shown here move from being an odd discovery, or worse yet a curiosity, to take on the status of genuine American classics – the oldest and the newest that we have.

ABOUT POEMS AND POETICS: In this age of internet and blog the possibility opens of a free circulation of works (poems and poetics in the present instance) outside of any commercial or academic nexus. I will therefore be posting work of my own, both new & old, that may otherwise be difficult or impossible to access, and I will also, from time to time, post work by others who have been close to me, in the manner of a freewheeling on-line anthology or magazine. I take this to be in the tradition of autonomous publication by poets, going back to Blake and Whitman and Dickinson, among numerous others.

Technicians of the Sacred, August 2017Expanded Fiftieth Anniversary EditionUniversity of California Press

* The index below is organized chronoloigally, starting with a post from May 20, 2012, when Poems and Poetics first appeared in Jacket2. Earlier posts in the series, going back to 2008, may be found at Poems and Poetics.